Let me say unabashedly from the outset: I love dance. I revere dancers; their skill, endurance, fearlessness, and energy knock me out. With apologies to my Drama Division students and colleagues, whom I hope will forgive me, on my own personal scale of things artistic, I put dancers on the top rung. So when I first started teaching Acting for Dancers, an elective course in the Dance Division, it was hard for me to imagine why anyone who could dance would want to descend a rung to become an actor. But I soon found that we in the theater might have something to offer dancers, and I became determined to create a class where dancers could try something new, let go of old ways, where they who work so hard and achieve so much could safely fail.

Richard Feldman (third from left, with faculty member John Stix, second from left), at work in class. (Photo by Jessica Katz)

There are five students this year in Acting for Dancers. The numbers have varied over the 13 years I’ve taught the class. We’ve been as many as 16, as few as three. The students’ reasons for taking the class have varied too from year to year and from student to student. Some come with the notion that the class will help them become more expressive in their dancing, some are looking ahead to a time when they won’t be dancing anymore, some are hoping to acquire or hone skills that will expand their dance careers into musical theater. But most come with a half-articulated sense that they need something—another way to work and think, a new source, a new process. Whatever the number of students, whatever the reasons they come to Room 102, Wednesday afternoons at 2:30, the first thing we do is cover the mirrors.

From year to year we’ve done all manners of exercises—improvisations, character studies. We speak or we just move. But whatever the particular exercise, certain general values emerge. Concentration, relaxation, the spirit of exploration and discovery, spontaneity, the art of the possible, not the probable, are what we’re after down in 102. And self-consciousness, judging, the desire or compulsion to perform, to do it right, are in our way. So mirrors, an important tool in other dance classes, are in our way. They are the first things to go.

First-year drama students would feel at home in Acting for Dancers. They’d recognize the exercises and etudes from their acting class with John Stix. They’d sympathize with the struggles of the dancers as they use their instrument in a new way, as they try not working according to a plan, not choreographing an exercise, and they begin to let themselves respond to their imagination and to each other in the moment. They give up knowing, they start living on stage.

But let’s talk more concretely. Right now in class we’re working on a portrait exercise. The students find a painting of a person that attracts them somehow, stimulates them to imagine a life for that person beyond the painting. They imagine their situation, where they’re coming from and where they’re going to, literally and metaphorically. They explore that life on their feet, creating imaginary circumstances, asking questions with the senses about who or what is around them, discovering the sights, sounds, and smells of their imaginary life. An inner life begins to emerge, the character’s dramatic situation becomes clear. The students then look for a text—a short poem—that somehow connects to the life they’ve discovered in the portrait. Then the fateful day is upon us in Acting for Dancers. The dancers are going to use a set text—they are going to speak.

And so, this past week, A. gets up to work. She had found a portrait of a woman leaning out a window in a rundown apartment. She had taken on the pose and had explored beautifully. She had discovered who this woman was. The woman had seen better days. She was on her last legs, a former beauty, now an addict and a prostitute. A. found a poem by Ntozake Shange that she felt connected to the woman in the painting and today she was going to incorporate the text in her exploration.

No sooner does she get up and begin to speak, the tension in her body and face that we have not seen in class for two months returns. In a robust, poetic voice A. is performing the poem. We stop. "I rehearsed all night," she says. "I worked out just how to say it."

I ask her if she could put her plan aside and reconnect to the life she had created earlier, to not know she was going to speak, let alone how or what she would say. She goes back to work. Soon the imaginary room appears again—the light, the dirt. Her focus is turned not on us but on the dirty sheets, the man lying beside her. The tension disappears from A.’s face. The woman in the portrait is back. She sits on the edge of her bed. After a mighty inner struggle she gets out her works and shoots up. And sitting there, letting the imaginary drug run through her, the woman/A. decides to speak. This time the text is not a poem from a book; it is the woman telling her story. A. speaks, no longer following her plan. She’s responding to her thoughts in the moment. She’s human, personal, spontaneous. She finishes. The room is very quiet. For that period of time self-consciousnness and the desire to perform are temporarily turned aside; exploration, discovery, unpredictable life are in the fore.

Richard Feldman has been a member of the drama faculty since 1987.